by James Hilton
“I h-hope so too,” answered Philip, shaking hands with him rather wearily…
The counting went on. At ten minutes past midnight Kemp whispered to Stella that it was going to be “a damned near thing—damned near.”
Excitement grew amongst the watchers round the tables. Stella, loving excitement of any kind, had yet had enough of it for one night; like Philip, she stood some way off, preferring to be told the result when it should be discovered. Her brain was whirling round and round; it seemed to her that the electric lights were dancing jigs in front of her eyes; the thick smoke from the men’s cigarettes was giving her a headache.
All at once she saw Ward standing in front of her, and in his eyes was such a fierce light of pleasure that she seized his arm convulsively. “Is it good news?” she cried eagerly. “Tell me—tell me—is he in?”
“Splendid news,” he answered, calmly, and then perceiving her meaning, added: “Oh, not about the election—they haven’t finished counting yet.”
Something sagged in her mind; she could have struck him then, for raising such hopes in her and dashing them to pieces.
“That little boy I told you about has pulled through,” he went on. “I thought it was hopeless this morning, but an hour ago…he seemed to turn the corner. I’ve been with him nearly all day…didn’t have time to vote even…awfully sorry…”
The electric lights and the cigarette smoke and the trestle tables and Ward himself trailed away into vagueness again…
Then all at once a cry went up, only to be immediately hushed by a clamour of voices. “Monsell’s in…Monsell’s in…”
She rushed over to Philip and buried her head against his shoulder. She could not speak. Neither could he. People rushed round him, seizing his hand and shouting: “Congrats…old man…Splendid…In by seven…Seven…Majority of seven…”
Above the hubbub came the sharp, exquisitely controlled voice of Grainger addressing his agent. “Demand a recount…”
“Recount—recount. There’s going to be a re count…” Stella found herself near to Kemp. “What does it mean, a recount?” she whispered. “Does it mean there’s been a mistake?”
“It means,” he answered churlishly, “exactly what it says—a recount.”
A slow subsiding of the clamour and then silence again, broken only by the occasional bursts of cheering from outside. The rain was falling faster than ever. The clock struck the half-hour, then the three-quarters, then one o’clock, then a quarter-past…
Stella was white as chalk when the end came. Clamour once more, sickening and hideous, and all the air throbbing and buzzing in her ears. “Grainger in…Grainger in. In by three.” Ward was next to her, holding her, speaking to her quietly, profoundly: “Don’t be alarmed…Don’t let go…Shall I get you some water?”
“Take me to Philip…” she gasped.
But she could not get near Philip, could not see where he was, could not see him anywhere in the room. All she could hear was Kemp’s voice snarl ing and defiant: “Another recount…I demand another recount…”
Clamour more than ever, and then silence, more throbbing, palpitating silence than before. Half-past one, a quarter to two, two o’clock…
“Grainger…Grainger…Majority of two…majority of two…”
She would have fainted then, had not Ward held her. She could hardly realise anything that had happened. “Philip’s not got in?” she whispered hazily, and Ward slowly shook his head. “Bad luck…bad luck…” was all he could say.
VI
She sat in a tiny cupboard-like room while noise and commotion went on outside. Ward had been with her and had left her for a while. Then he came back with face clouded. “I’ve been out there,” he said, pointing vaguely to the window. “It’s raining hard. Poor old Philip!…It’s a hard blow to him. He—he couldn’t speak when his turn came, but old Kemp got up and said something for him. It seems cruel—to miss it by so little. And—and the curious thing is—” He paused, and looked as if he were wondering whether to proceed.
“What is curious?” she whispered.
He went on pensively: “I’ve just been working it out. It looks just like fate. Down at the house I’ve been visiting there were three voters, and but for the boy being so ill they’d have voted for Philip. Then, with my vote as well, that would have been four more—just enough to turn the scale…It’s rather maddening to think of, isn’t it?”
She nodded, and the clock somewhere in the build ing above startled them by chiming the quarter.
“Anyway,” she said, in a different tone, “I’m glad the little boy’s better.” She spoke as if she were remembering something strange and far-off.
For a long moment they stared at each other in silence, and then all at once it was as if a great calm had come to both of them, healing their disappointment and making them sane for the future.
He suddenly grasped her hand and squeezed it till she winced involuntarily. “That’s the way to talk,” he said gruffly. “That’s the way to talk…After all, do—do these things “—he gave a little gesture with his hand—“do they matter such—such a very great deal?”
She answered: “You don’t think they do. Neither do I…But Philip…”
“Yes,” he interrupted. “I’m damned sorry for Philip.”
VII
She did not tell Philip of the four lost votes that had made all the difference. But somebody else, apparently, gave him the details, for he mentioned the matter very calmly when he got home.
“It seems ironical,” he remarked, “that I should have lost because my greatest friend didn’t vote for me.”
“Couldn’t,” she insisted. “Not didn’t.”
He seemed perplexed by her reminder. “Oh, of course…Why, did you think for a moment that I supposed—?” He paused and finished with a new note altogether. “Never mind, Stella. I shall succeed—some day—somehow. I’m not easy to dishearten. With every defeat I get stronger…fight harder…I—I live for my ambitions, and some day, when I have won through, I shall be happy…”
* * *
CHAPTER VII
I
Stella kept her promise that, if Philip lost the bye- election, she would tell Mrs. Monsell of their engagement. She did so, and Mrs. Monsell received the news with half-cynical incredulity. “Do you mean to tell me that Philip has at last done what any other young man would have done as soon as he met you?” she asked, and added, when Stella looked puzzled: “Do you mean to say he has fallen in love with you?”
“He says he has.”
“Then you can take it from me it’s the truth. Philip wouldn’t say he loved anybody till he’d analysed himself to the last atom…I suppose, by the way, that you’re in love with him?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Stella shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. I don’t analyse myself.”
Behind her usual mask of raillery Mrs. Monsell seemed quite pleased with the turn of events. She suggested, and Stella agreed to, a dinner-party to celebrate the announcement; Philip was not enthusiastic, but he acquiesced when he saw that Stella wanted it. They spent a rather baffling half-hour deciding who should be invited. “Ward, of course,” said Philip, when the list was nearly complete. And Stella replied: “Oh, yes, of course.”
The day of the party arrived, but towards tea-time a messenger-boy brought a note from Ward apologising and regretting that he could not come because of an urgent case. Stella was half-glad, half-sorry; Philip was deeply disappointed. Nevertheless, the party went off without a hitch; Stella was brilliantly vivacious and scored an immense success with a few Hungarian songs in the drawing-room afterwards, and Mrs. Monsell shone with her usual hard, opalescent glitter. Even Philip talked animatedly—about politics.
The guests were taking their farewell whiskies before departure when Stella heard a sharp ring at the front door. Venner was engaged elsewhere, so she went into the hall and turned the lock herself, leaving Philip in the drawing-room
with the others. A curious inward premonition warned her whom she might expect to see, so that when the door swung open she was not in the least surprised: He was standing there on the top step in a leather motoring coat and leggings, carrying his gauntlet gloves in his hand, and with his goggles pushed upwards from his eyes over his forehead.
“I’m so sorry I couldn’t come earlier,” he said, smiling. “But I thought I’d run round at the last minute and congratulate you…both of you.”
Outside the drive lost itself in the white icy mist that crept in from the marshes on these winter evenings, and the head-lamp of Ward’s motor-bicycle shone like a dull yellow globe, lighting up the swathes of vapour that passed ghost-like in front of it. Stella, clad in a light evening frock, shivered as she stood.
“Thank you very much,” she replied, with her teeth chattering. “So good of you to call. I wish you could have come to dinner. Philip would have been pleased…It’s cold to-night, isn’t it?…You’ll come in and have a drink to warm you, won’t you?…Oh, I forgot—you’re teetotal…How unfortunate—but there’s lemonade…Do come in…”
“Sorry, but I’d best get back. I’ve work to do before I go to bed.”
“But come in and see Philip, anyway. Or let me go in and fetch him.”
“No, really, I’d rather you didn’t. I don’t want to make any fuss. Just tell him I called to congratulate you both, that’s all…”
“You’re shy of coming in,” she said.
“Yes. I’m always shy of meeting a crowd of people I don’t know. Stupid of me, isn’t it?…Well, you’ll be catching cold if you stop here any longer. Good-bye…See you again some time.”
He smiled boyishly and sprang on to his machine and was off. The noise attracted Philip from the drawing-room.
“Who was that, Stella?”
She answered: “Ward. He came to give us his—his congratulations.”
“Why didn’t he come in?”
She replied: “I asked him to, but he said he was in a great hurry and couldn’t stop.”
He took her by the arm and led her back into the hall.
“We must ask him round some evening by himself,” he said slowly. “He’ll come then, I’m sure. You’ve got over your old dislike of him, I suppose?”
She answered simply: “Yes.”
II
She was passionately fond of sea-bathing, and Chassingford was only seven or eight miles from the sea. She used to drive herself down in the two-seater car to a lonely part of the coast, change behind the closed hood, and then run down into the water and splash and swim about to her heart’s content. The sea was almost always calm, and the land, segmented into huge dyke-bound marshes, was protected from it by a high turf sea wall. At low tide the sands and mud-flats ran out evenly for over a mile.
Towards the close of March there came an afternoon so rich with warmth and sunlight that she was tempted to indulge in her first bathe of the year. The hint of spring was in the air, thrilling all who breathed it with a rare and intoxicating joy, and to Stella, more than to most living creatures, it was irresistible. As she drove through the decaying villages to the marshes the tang of the sea assailed her and made her immensely eager to shed her clothes and be breasting the sunlit waves. She took the car as far as she could along a sandy uneven road that led nowhere in particular, and then, after changing into a bathing costume and mackintosh, raced for nearly a mile over the marshlands to the ridge of sea wall that had seemed only a few hundred yards away. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky, and by the time she doffed her mackintosh and ran down the sands to the water she was warm from exertion.
The tide was high and almost on the turn. Not a soul was in sight, nor was there likely to be a living person anywhere round about, for the marshes were uncultivated and the nearest village was several miles away. She loved the loneliness as well as the sunshine, for it reminded her of the sun-baked shores of the Danube, with just such another turf wall as this to protect it from the turmoil of the water. Indeed this part of the coast, to which hardly the most pertinacious tripper penetrated, made her almost homesick, despite the years she had been in England. When she had first discovered it, during the course of a long and solitary cycling expedition, she had actually cried, so poignant had been the reminder of things half-forgotten.
She did not cry now, but was rapturously and ecstatically happy at the thought of a glorious bathe and swim at least two months earlier than she had dared to hope. She walked out into the sea till the water reached her waist, and then struck out with all her limbs, swimming as hard as she could. The water was very cold, much colder than she had expected, but she hoped that the effort of hard swimming would warm her. After about a quarter-of-an-hour she felt decidedly less chilly, and then, for the first time, lifted her head and tried to see exactly where she was.
It seemed that she was in the midst of the wide and open sea, with no land for miles. She could not discern the low-lying fringe of sea wall in any direction, nor could she have believed that she had swum so far out. Then she recognised a little pin point on the horizon which she knew was the steeple of Marshhaven Church, the nearest village to the coast. It looked miles farther away than from the sea wall, but it gave her a direction, at any rate. She smiled to herself quite confidently, though even a few seconds’ cessation of movement was enough to give her a strange, tight sensation of cold in her limbs. She must swim back in the direction of the land, and as quickly as possible. She knew herself to be an excellent swimmer, and was not in the least afraid.
But a few strokes in the homeward direction sent the first thrill of fear through her. She understood now why she had been able to swim so far out in so short a time. The tide was racing out, as it did in these wide estuaries, and the ebb-current, though not a perfidious one, was like a great icy wall pushing her back as she battered herself against it.
Afterwards she remembered that she deliberately told herself to keep calm, speaking the words aloud, and paying for her foolishness by a mouthful of water. Then she set herself grimly and resolutely to the task of swimming ashore against the current. It was the only thing to do, and therefore there was nothing of the mental struggle involved in making a desperate decision. Just iron grit, that was all, fortified by the knowledge that she had often swum against the stream of the Danube years before.
A quarter-of-an-hour later she saw or thought she saw that the coast was coming nearer. She could see the sea wall very faintly on the horizon, and the point of Marshhaven steeple seemed a little higher in the sky. She swam on without a pause, telling herself that she was winning and that she would soon be safe.
Ten minutes after that she counted her victory won. The sea wall was plain now, and there was a man walking along it—she could see him quite distinctly. Probably he was a farm labourer using the wall as a short cut to some remote little place…The current was much stronger near the land, and the water seemed colder too. Only another few hundred yards and she would be able to put her feet down and walk…Then a sharp pain gripped her round the thighs and spread down her legs in a long burning wave. She was calm enough even then to say to herself: I suppose this is the “cramp” they talk about…
The next thing she knew was that she was lying stretched out amidst the tall grasses of the sea wall, and that a man was bending over her, raising her arms up and down and staring at her intently.
“Ah,” he said.
Her ears, rather than her eyes (which did not yet seem to be working quite properly) told her that the man was Ward. Why on earth was he here, though?—What could possibly have brought him to such a place?
“You?” she gasped.
“Yes, me,” he answered grimly.
He bustled around her, saying nothing and doing a great deal. The grim look on his face never once lightened into a smile. The sun, as if obedient to some mystic change of atmosphere, had disappeared behind thick banks of vapoury cloud that had drifted up from the sea. She noticed—all these things very gradually—that
he was sopping wet from head to feet—that he wore no boots, and that his short-cropped hair still dripped water on to his forehead.
At last he said quietly: “You must get back to the car. Can you walk or shall I carry you?”
“I’ll walk.”
“Very well. Hold on to my arm.”
After about ten yards through the thick, tough grasses on the sea wall she gasped weakly: “I—I don’t think I—I can walk any more.”
“Very well. I’ll carry you.”
He picked her up as matter-of-factly as he might have done a rather bulky parcel. “You’ll be more comfortable if you hang on round my neck,” he remarked.
She took no notice, but after a while the strain of the position made her realise the soundness of his advice. She put her arm round his neck.
He said nothing, and after a while she could not endure his silence. She felt she must say something, however stupid, to break the intolerable silence.
“You’re wet through,” she whispered.
The grim face did not relax, but the lips just moved. “Swimming with one’s clothes on has a habit of making one wet through.”
“There was no need for you to come in,” she answered coldly. “I didn’t ask you to.”
Silence again. Was he never going to reply? She went on impetuously, after a long pause: “I wasn’t in any danger. I was swimming in quite well on my own. When I was a girl I used to swim across the Danube often.”
He said slowly and calculatingly: “I don’t care if you used to swim across the Atlantic—you’re a damned little fool and you deserve a good hiding.”
III
While she changed into her clothes and dried her self behind the closed hood of the car, he went off amongst the marshes and somehow or other managed to remove most of the water from his person. Then he came back and drove her very grimly home to Chassingford.